Leon Oswald
Leon Oswald is one of the new faces arriving to Kaleido Stage in the second season. At first, Leon is just as cold and mean as Layla was before she met Sora, but since Leon is far more cynical than Layla ever was, stays this way longer than she did.Leon is an incredible performer who comes to Kaleido Stage after Layla is forced to retire. Because of his past performances and dropping of so many partners, Leon has earned the nickname of "The Grim Reaper".His Japanese voice actor is Takahiro Sakurai and Mike MacRae voices him in the English anime.Leon's only song is named "Angel Dust" found on the Kaleido Star Vocal Album. Character Description *Gender: Male *Age: 18 *Astrological Sign: Scorpio *Home: France *Family: Unknown Mother and Father, Sophie - Sister *Affiliation: Kaleido Stage *Friends: Sora Naegino, May Wong, Layla Hamilton, Yuri Killian, Anna Heart and Mia Guillem *Partner(s): Sophie (Until her death), May (For Dracula and the Circus Festival), Sora (For Sayuki and Swan Lake) *Rival: Yuri (Unknown at this point if he still holds grudges against Yuri) *Specialty: Trapeze *Interesting Fact: Leon is one of the few characters who speaks with an accent in his voice. Kaleido Star: New Wings Leon is a new addition to the cast in the start of season two when he is Sora's partner after Layla was forced to retire because of her injured shoulder during The Legendary Great Maneuver. Leon is cold towards everyone and only appears to perform for very short whiles. During a performance of Sayuki, when he was the lead alongside Sora, he stops in the middle of the show and walks off. Sora then tries to take over both roles to keep the show going, even though it is failing when the audience realizes this. Suddenly, May bursts in from nowhere and shouts that she is here to upstage Sora for causing the accident that ruined Layla's career. When Leon sees them dueling on stage, he suddenly returns willing to see which girl is the better performer. This leads Sora and May to start competting against each other as fierce rivals to gain the position of Leon's partner. During one moment, Leon starts to insult Layla by calling her weak and Sora explodes with anger demanding that he apologize before falling to the floor in tears. While Sora and May continue their rivalry, they eventually find each other in a ice skating contest for the upcoming production of Dracula. While the idea was not originally in Mia's concept, Leon favors in the idea of adding ice skating and Mia is forced to change the script to fit it in. When it comes time for Leon to choose who will be his partner, he chooses May after Sora fails to beat her. While Sora is reduced to a supporting role while May takes the lead, the show is eventually too scary for the children which led to Sora and friends to create the Kid's Stage. Leon believes this to be a ridiculous idea and walks off with May. One day, Layla comes to Kaleido Stage with two tickets to the International Circus Festival she received because she had won the last one. She tells Sora and May that she is giving the tickets to Leon, and it is his choice as to who will go with him to the Circus Festival... While they are backstage preparing for the show, Leon says he can give May a chance to really become his partner. While on stage, however, he ad libs by dropping May and then catching her arm. The problem is, it injures the completely off-guard May's left shoulder and she is left incapacitated after then. Sora is worried about May, but Layla warns her that if she doesn't want to be destroyed by Leon too, she'll have to focus completely on becoming his partner. Trying to make Leon see her as a performer, Sora goes through Leon's special training and makes it. But when it comes time that Sora is close to becoming Leon's partner, she begins to worry after what happened to May. She is soon unable to do a simple maneuver, which it causes May to rise back and gain the position of Leon's partner with her Demon Spiral technique while still having a broken shoulder. While Leon and May go onto the Circus Festival, Sora and Yuri follow as another team. Leon and May win after Sora drops out in tears during her performance (not being used to the cruel, tense atmosphere at the festival) which then causes Sora to quit Kaleido Stage and May becomes the best star. May and Leon perform their comeback show of Romeo and Juliet just as Sora gains up the will to return to Kaleido Stage and recover her place. When Leon finds out that Sora's dream is to become a Kaleido Star by creating a show with no competition, Leon's beliefs of her start changing. He tries to make Sora become his partner late one night and even grabs her by the arm, but she is scared by Leon grabbing her and she runs across a street just as a car is coming. Leon begins seeing a memory of his sister Sophie running to him before a car hits her. He yells out Sophie's name and knocks Sora out of the way just as the car comes (though Sora was actually safe on the other side of the street when Leon came at her). He then calls her Sophie before walking away muttering "So you are the one....after all." Since that moment, Leon is convinced that Sora is his real partner. During one performance, while Sora was spreading flower petals over May and Leon, Leon actually climbs up to where Sora is on stage and pulls her down onto the trapeze. While May sees this as a chance to finally defeat Sora (Leon said that May would never be able to match Sora or Sophie as his partner), Leon performs alongside them trying to keep Sora from leaving. Sora eventually misses a bar and falls just as Leon tries to catch her; but instead of a repeat with May, Sora is saved by Leon and she pulls off The Angel's Maneuver with Leon, which leaves May speechless. As he and Sora stand together, he sees a ghostly figure of his sister where Sora is. However, as Sora leaves, Leon jumps off the trapeze towards her without anything to grab onto. This causes Leon to fall to the bottom of the stage injured and the audience is left in shock. Leon is left out for a while until he returns to continue Sora's training with the Angel's Maneuver for the production Swan Lake. During his time out, Sora and friends visit Leon's old teacher, Alain, in France and he reveals Leon and Sophie's past to them. Apparently, Sophie and Leon's guardians who took them in after their parents' deaths were pretty willing to give them up when Alain saw their talents and asked to train them. Under Alain's wing, Leon and Sophie trained hard as children and Sophie was actually considered better than her older brother. One day while the siblings are practicing, Leon drops Sophie; grabbing her again, Alainis shocked as he sees Sophie float upwards just like a feather. Thinking that she could do this maneuver, which is dubbed the Angel's Maneuver, Alain started putting Sophie through harder training and Leon soon followed (he even juggled lead balls as a child for upper body strength). When Sophie finally wears down from the training during a show and everyone curses at them, Leon takes Sophie and tells Alain that he will continue her training. Over time, this eventually led to Sophie's death at the Circus Festival. While training Sora, Leon tries to keep word of his promise to Sophie of training someone who can perfect the maneuver. Most of his training consisted of Sora being able to maintain her posture on one foot and balancing. Soon, he and Yuri cross paths again when Yuri returned with Sora and the others from France. Sora has no idea why Leon and Yuri would act so strange between each other until Yuri finally reveals that he and Layla were opponents of Leon and Sophie at the Circus Festival once... Yuri didn't like Leon's presence in his world and made a phone call to Sophie before their time to perform came, tricking her into believing he wanted to speak to her privately before the contest so she and Leon would be disqualified for not showing up in time. However, the plan horribly backfired because she raced back to Leon after finding out the call was fake, and then she was hit by a car in front of her brother. As Sophie was laying in her deathbed, Leon called Yuri and begged him to come see Sophie as a last favor; Yuri, however, refused to do so, fearing that this would reveal the whole gambit to him. Sophie uiltimately died, Later that night, because of Yuri's taunts, the two duel to see who is truly Sora's partner in the Angel's Maneuver. Sora arrives just in time to see them start duelling with prop swords, with Yuri hitting Leon's berserk buttons and loudly accusing him of being a coward, while Leon yells back at him for causing Sophie's accident. She manages to end their battle peacefully and Leon becomes Sora's partner when Layla steps in to firmly end their squabble. Leon first has Sora do squats on a log, telling her that she is not allowed to make the water ripple. He then has her leap on the trampoline, take his hands, and let him throw her towards the high bar. The goal was to stand in a perfect angel pose on the trapeze. Sora, however, lacking the basic balance skills, takes a very long time to manage to do this, and Leon quickly sees that she is compensating for the balance by putting all her weight on her toes. One day, Sora finally manages to stand perfectly balanced on the bar, and Leon tells her to keep the pose. The hours pass, and just as the sun is setting, Sora slips slightly. Declaring that the training is over, Leon leaves Sora in the room. Kalos is displeased about Leon's decision to end the training early, and tells him that it doesn't satisfy him. Leon ignores him and leaves. The next day Sora confronts him in the hall and tells him that if he wouldn't train her then, she would train herself. Shocked at this, Leon tries his best to hide his surprise and goes into the nearest practice room. Anna's father Jack Heart, now a proffesional comedian with his own show, advertises a type of shoe with bouncy tennis balls attached to the bottom. Ken spots this while Sara is watching this, and gets an idea. Buying the shoes for Sora, he tells her to use them to improve her balance and she does. After many weeks of training with the shoes, Sora heads back to the pool and stands on the log again. Determined to make the water stay still this time, she moves in agony down. Just as she comes back up, Leon arrives and tells her to stop. He is confused as to why both she and Sophie are so willing to push themselves to their limits, and that a stage with no competition can never become reality. Sora responds by telling him that he can't be sure of that because no one as seen it before. Sora goes on to say that Sophie probably wanted Leon to see a peaceful stage too, and Leon remembers Sophie's last minutes in the hospital as she asks him to promise her to find a person who can complete the Angel's Manuever. Realizing that Sophie was doing it all for him, he is shocked. Sora then falls over from exhaustion, and Leon catches her, telling her that he will start up the training again. Finally getting into the real training, Leon has Sora stand on a bar inside the seat of a yacht while in the Angel pose, and drives the yacht off across the water with crazy turns and speed. After Sora manages to stay like this, he has her leap up into the air and land back in the same place on the yacht in the same pose. After she manages to do this, Leon finally admits that Sora is ready. As the duo show their newly perfected Angel's Maneuver to the cast, Layla enters with Yuri, and challenges Sora to a competition for the role of Odette. Taking up the challenge, Sora and Leon take the stage with Layla, and Leon is surprised, when, in the middle of the choreographed routine, Sora spirals down to him and tells him that she plans to ad-lib a little bit. As Leon watches her, he realizes that she is creating an atmosphere in which the people watching and the people performing become one, and he realizes that this is what Sophie had been telling him all about before. When it is finally time for the show, Leon apologizes to Sora for mocking her idol Layla earlier on and she forgives him. They go on to perform in the show and the show is a grand success, with Leon feeling he has fulfilled his promise to Sophie. Leon makes a guest appearance in the Kaleido Star OVA The Princess Who Never Smiles and is casted as a clown alongside Anna and May, which oddly goes against his character profile and personality. Even during training, he feels like this is the hardest role he has ever done. But his moves not only humored Charlotte and Julie, but it scared Anna when he seemed to be going too far (she earlier claimed that he was copying her act). He makes a brief cameo appareance during the Phoenix performance in the Kaleido Star 2nd OVA Legend of the Phoenix. Performances Through the Series *''Circus Festival'' (Before series start) - Lost, partnered with Sophie (probably had to forfeit due to his sister's death) *''Sayuki'' - Son Goku (Lead, partnered with Sora) *''Dracula'' - Dracula (Lead, partnered with May) *''Circus Festival'' - Victor, partnered with May *''Swan Lake'' - Prince Siegfried (Lead, partnered with Sora)